For full disclosure, I only completed one of the story paths.
FSR has a decent story behind the lengthy cutscenes and dialogues. The story didn't feel particularly deep and the surprises didn't really wow me either, but it was generally enjoyable.
My issue with the story though is that outside of the big story beats and the master/servant events, the detective investigation scenes in-between aren't very exciting. Nice at first, but it feels dragged out after about 2 chapters in.
Edo and its various districts are visually appealing most of the time and are varied in design. Structure-wise though, they are nearly identical with essentially large rooms connected by narrow hallways. There's no dungeons in this game since battles occur in these districts.
There isn't a whole lot of things to do despite the large district size. Searching for crafting items, visiting food vendors and petting cats/dogs are what you do most of the time other than the combat stuff.
Combat is a big portion of the game and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it has a lot of mechanics to make use of and Iori's has many different fighting stances that play quite different from one another. Saber and the other servants have their own unique abilities as well. On the other hand, combat gets stale after a while and on Normal difficulty, you don't need to change up your playstyle much especially once you unlock the later stances.
It does get compared to Musou and Warriors games a lot. It's not necessarily the same, but does retain a lot of those mechanics. You're not combatting hundreds of enemies on screen, but you are fighting tons of mob enemies that's mostly just there. The combo mechanics aren't that deep and uses a similar combo chain from the Warriors games. Enemies don't really get stagger much so I'm not even sure it's possible to pull off crazy long combos.
Boss fights are where the combat shines with their more unique attack patterns and conditions. But that's where the shell mechanic is at its worst for me. I'm not a fan of spending a considerable amount of time depleting an enemy's shell (similarly to a shield gauge in other games) before being able to do more than chip damage. It does get better once you unlock better skills that allows you to take down the shell quicker, but even then, it feels like an annoying mechanic to deal with.
Overall, FSR is decent even if I felt like it was longer than I'd liked. I'm not a fan of having considerable NG+ exclusive content especially with a special route/ending. I don't think I enjoyed the game enough to spending more hours to see how that turns out.
FSR has a decent story behind the lengthy cutscenes and dialogues. The story didn't feel particularly deep and the surprises didn't really wow me either, but it was generally enjoyable.
My issue with the story though is that outside of the big story beats and the master/servant events, the detective investigation scenes in-between aren't very exciting. Nice at first, but it feels dragged out after about 2 chapters in.
Edo and its various districts are visually appealing most of the time and are varied in design. Structure-wise though, they are nearly identical with essentially large rooms connected by narrow hallways. There's no dungeons in this game since battles occur in these districts.
There isn't a whole lot of things to do despite the large district size. Searching for crafting items, visiting food vendors and petting cats/dogs are what you do most of the time other than the combat stuff.
Combat is a big portion of the game and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it has a lot of mechanics to make use of and Iori's has many different fighting stances that play quite different from one another. Saber and the other servants have their own unique abilities as well. On the other hand, combat gets stale after a while and on Normal difficulty, you don't need to change up your playstyle much especially once you unlock the later stances.
It does get compared to Musou and Warriors games a lot. It's not necessarily the same, but does retain a lot of those mechanics. You're not combatting hundreds of enemies on screen, but you are fighting tons of mob enemies that's mostly just there. The combo mechanics aren't that deep and uses a similar combo chain from the Warriors games. Enemies don't really get stagger much so I'm not even sure it's possible to pull off crazy long combos.
Boss fights are where the combat shines with their more unique attack patterns and conditions. But that's where the shell mechanic is at its worst for me. I'm not a fan of spending a considerable amount of time depleting an enemy's shell (similarly to a shield gauge in other games) before being able to do more than chip damage. It does get better once you unlock better skills that allows you to take down the shell quicker, but even then, it feels like an annoying mechanic to deal with.
Overall, FSR is decent even if I felt like it was longer than I'd liked. I'm not a fan of having considerable NG+ exclusive content especially with a special route/ending. I don't think I enjoyed the game enough to spending more hours to see how that turns out.